The project is embedded in the social media platform Instagram @flat_gaze

@flat_gaze is accompanied by Maks Valenčič's essay Open Secret. Read the full text on osmo/za's website.

        Matej Mihevc: @flat_gaze by Ljudmila Lab on YouTube

Events at osmo/za (Slovenska 54, 8th floor)

Visit the exhibition:

• Thursday, 9 December | 18h-21h
• Friday, 10 December | 16h-19h
• Saturday and Sunday (11-12 December) | 12h-16h
• Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (13-15 December) | 16h-19h
  
  

Discussion (Matej Mihevc, Benjamin Fele, Maks Valenčič):

• Tuesday, 14 December | 18h

About the project

With the project @flat_gaze, new media artist of the younger generation Matej Mihevc explores the specificity of the current state of cultural production after post-internet. @flat_gaze raises questions about objectivity and meaning, innovation and authorship and the processes of production and dissemination in the arts and the broader cultural sphere, which are mutating at an accelerated rate with the advancement of neural networks and the increasing accessibility of artificial intelligence technologies.

@flat_gaze is embedded in the social media platform Instagram, today’s increasingly relevant art venue, which instead of an economy of value, aura and meaning is shaped by an economy of attention, reach and affect. The project @flat_gaze updates the contemporary figure of the creator of cultural content as a remixer, DJ, programmer or curator of content into a generative and automatised feedback web of consumption and production (of images).

The project includes the Instagram profile @flat_gaze, which follows specific profiles of individuals, art galleries and blogs related to digital, post-internet and contemporary arts that are posting photographic documentation of exhibitions, digital objects and their various intertwinements. The posts from these profiles are automatically aggregated and serve as a database for training the neural network StyleGAN2-ADA. The network learns unsupervised, and every day the automated process chooses random coordinates in the latent space, from which it generates the images that are posted on the @flat_gaze profile.

Thus, during their daily scrolling through Instagram, followers of the profile come across the algorithmically generated images which vividly recapitulate cultural patterns, trends and currents into outlines of objects, spaces and moods. In fact, they are two-dimensional visualisations of the sections of multidimensional categories into which the neural network quantifies cultural production. Thus, they present the human-visible fragments of an otherwise alien and incomprehensible algorithmic “view” of the cultural field.

In this, each image – even though as human followers we attempt to treat it as particular and meaningful because of the unusual semantic combinations – is special precisely in its genericness and (spatial and semantic) depth, which is only a surface effect. The automatised and hyperproductive loop does not communicate, criticise or reveal anything. It merely indifferently generates new affective possibilities for the human consumer and anticipates the algorithmically enriched creative processes of the future.

Photo

Photo: Matjaž Rušt

About the artist

Matej Mihevc (1995) is a graduate student of Video and New Media at the Academy of Fine Art and Design (ALUO) of the University of Ljubljana. In his work, he deals with the influence of new technologies on cultural production. His past collaborations include numerous design projects; recently, he has been nurturing an interest in various industrial processes and artificial materials (3D printing, designing plastics, etc.) as well as in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In October 2020, he received the award for the best student project at the International Festival of Computer Art (MFRU) in Maribor for his work Latent space walk. In November 2021, together with Farah Sara Kurnik, he presented the project Kambrijski vmesniki (Cambrian Interfaces, 2021). Already for the fifth year, he leads the Radio Študent show Modem, in which he explores underground internet music.

Artist: Matej Mihevc
Programming and technical support: Benjamin Fele
Curators: Maja Burja, Tjaša Pogačar
Text (Open Secret): Maks Valenčič
Translations and language editing: Nataša Martina Pintarič, Jana Renée Wilcoxen, Matjaž Zgonc
PR: Jan Drozg, Anže Zorman
Visual design: Farah Sara Kurnik
Acknowledgements: Valter Udovičić

Production: Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory and Projekt Atol Institute with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Department for Culture of the Municipality of Ljubljana. The project is part of the EASTN-DC network, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.